Comment

Comments on stories are a way for Late Night Live listeners to contribute to and discuss the program.

Comments are moderated. Before you contribute, we recommend you read our house rules.

Reply

Author

Email

Date/Time

03 Aug 2015 7:06:04am

Text

PreviousMessage

That's one version - certainly it was what was being "fed to the troops" at the time. Another version says that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were actually bomb tests. The Anglo-American military machine "needed" to see what actually happened when an atomic bomb was dropped on a city, and this was the very last chance to do that until "the next war" (the one on Russia that they were already planning). They would have greatly preferred the tests to be on German cities (to gauge the effect on a European city of brick, steel, concrete and stone rather than a Japanese one of wood and paper) but the war in Europe was so very near to being over that the test sites were switched to Japan at the last moment. Two intact Japanese cities replaced the two intact German cities earmarked (one of them, Dresden, got destroyed "conventionally", just for the heck of it, or possibly as a "control".

Not saying this scenario is right, either - we'll probably never know for sure.

Either way - if the bombs hadn't been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima they would have been dropped on an "enemy" somewhere. There's simply no point in having a weapon when you're not sure quite what it does.

Please note that there is limit per post of 3,000 characters, including spaces, carriage returns and punctuation (about 500 words). Your email address will not be published.